Give it a mission, not a project
Fable 5 is here.
I ran a caffeinate command in terminal before I gave Claude’s new Fable model its first real task. Thought it would take a while.
Went and made coffee. Had some lunch. Walked past the computer a few minutes later.
Done.
The prompt was deliberately thin: “Help us improve the performance of this website.” No goals. No conversions, load times, bounce rates, time-on-page. No scope. I handed it a problem with no edges and pointed it to the tools it has access to like Posthog, Google, Github, etc.
It built its own edges and just ran.
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That was yesterday. I’ve had Fable for all of a day.
With earlier Opus and Codex models it felt like I could reach the limits. I knew where the tool ended and I had to step in. With Fable, it feels like it’s ready for more, and I’m not sure how to give it more.
That gap re-triggered something I thought I’d processed: the fear that the top 1% of people using AI tools are going to start pulling away from me if I don’t figure this out. The anxiety has been there since circa ChatGPT 3.5. I’d gotten over it. Fable brought it back.
I’m not going to give into that feeling, but I think it’s pointing at something worth naming.
The bottleneck is me
The Every team published their Fable reactions this week, and two lines landed close to where I landed.
Austin Tedesco: “The model is so good that, especially for knowledge work in growth and go to market, I feel like my own limitations are the only thing ever holding it back.”
Katie Parrott: “I haven’t found the right project to hand it yet, but that’s probably a failure of imagination on my part rather than the model’s.”
The bottleneck moved. It’s not the model anymore. It’s me. Ugh.
Missions > projects
My first instinct was to reach for the tool-selection frame: stop treating Claude Code as a hammer, think of the models as tools, match the knife to the screw. That’s useful. But model choice will be abstracted away eventually. OpenRouter-style routing will handle most of it. That’s not the real shift.
What caught me was something that happened inside the website deliverable.
Fable didn’t just return a list of recommendations. It proposed benchmarks, metrics to track, and a timeline for re-assessment. It built its own feedback mechanism into the output.
A project has a defined scope and a finish line. A mission has a direction, a method for measuring progress, and permission to keep iterating. I gave Fable a direction – improve the website – and it filled in everything else, including the loop.
Give it a mission instead of a project. That’s what I think the shift actually is.
Mission-framing doesn’t replace judgment. It requires it.
The performance recommendations were sharp. There’s an animated transition between the blog index and individual posts – a nice UI touch that’s apparently slowing the pages down. That call was right.
The design recommendations felt cold and lacking polish. Not that I’m a designer and have great taste.
But there’s still judgment, discernment, feel that has to be overlaid on top of this stuff. Because of that, there’s a risk in giving any setup full autonomous permissions. The mission still needs a human in the loop. Not to rubber-stamp the answers – to bring the taste.
Squashing the anxiety or FOMO
What I’m actually doing with the anxiety? Aside from living with it? Ha.
Not arm-wrestling Fable to see what it can do. Instead, I’m trying to focus on the business needs.
This reframe is calming me down:
Stop chasing model capability and start looking at the areas of opportunity. As in the problems that matter, the gaps where we’ve been leaving value on the table.
The question I’m bringing to it now is this: what are the projects we’ve dreamed about doing for customers – genuinely useful things – that we’ve never had the time, skills, capacity, or resources to get done? Is Fable capable of doing those now?
That’s a different question than “what can this model do.”
That’s a mission, not a project.
Onward,
Peter